Re-licensing Sentry (Interview)

David Cramer joined the show to talk about the recent license change of Sentry to the Business Source License from a BSD 3-clause license. We talk about the details that triggered this change, the specifics of the BSL license and its required parameters, the threat to commercial open source products like Sentry, his concerns for the “open core” model, and what the future of open source might look like in light of protections-oriented source-available licenses like the BSL becoming more common.

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Featuring:

• David Cramer – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• Re-licensing Sentry + Hacker News comments
• Re-licensing Sentry - FAQ & Discussion
• https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/ca8674c533a0dffc48a177554479bb85fa05891b
• Why We’re Relicensing CockroachDB
• Bruce Perns on the Business Source License
• Business Source License 1.1
• Adopting and Developing BSL Software
• The Changelog #278: Blockchains and Databases at OSCON with Monty Widenius, Brian Behlendorf, and Tague Griffith
• Adam Jacob on The Changelog
• OSI licenses

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!